Nokia's VP Purnima Kochikar has confirmed that Symbian will likely just fade away in an open letter to developers, despite the fact that there are a number of Symbian-based devices in the pipeline during the "transition period" of 2011-2012.

"In many markets, including markets where Symbian is currently the lead smartphone platform with significant market share such as China, India, Russia and Turkey, we will continue to make our Symbian portfolio as competitive as possible while we work with Microsoft to introduce Windows Phone," the letter says.

But when pressed to give a cut-off for the OS, Kochikar equivocates: "We cannot give you the date when Symbian will no longer be supported.

"Our intention is that when users come to the end of the natural lifecycle of their Symbian device they will make the change to a Nokia Windows Phone device and so it would not be in our interests to undermine their Nokia smartphone experience."

Meanwhile, Nokia has begun a rebranding phase, starting with a new font and look for promotional materials. The new font, dubbed "Nokia Pure" is meant to look, well, "pure and simple." The flow of the letters is intended to create "the impression of forward movement."

In addition to promotional materials, the new font will be used on Nokia devices. According to the Nokia blog, the font has been designed specifically for use in mobile and digital environments.

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I agree. I just bought the HTC Arrive last Monday. I'm loving it. The interface is really nice and intuitive. If MS would have released WP7 at the time Apple released iOS or at the time that Google released Android, then I really feel like it would be the dominate player in the market right now. Obviously, they didn't release it then, so we have what we have. A new player with little knowledge of its existance.

By the way, if you like integrating SharePoint, MS Office, and Lync/OCS into your cell phone, WP7 is the way to go. It's a great personal phone that can dual as a productivity phone, and none of the other phones out there can really make that claim.

I must admit that as SharePoint Architect, the SharePoint and Office integration i a very compelling feature of the W7 system. However it's not enough to make me let go of my iPhone4/Blackberry Torch for now.

MS should concentrate on the business case for W7, it appears too consumer targeted at this point. During my 10 minute play on a colleague's phone, the nicely smooth interface just doesn't seem very corporate and is confusing to some people. Not everybody wants a social media feed so prominent for example, and it manages to make the iPhone and iPad (toys in many people's eyes) seem quite work friendly by comparison. Sooo many businesses are leveraging SharePoint at the moment and access on the move is not easy on any platform (it just about works on the iPhone, but not in an authenticated way) so I feel they should make the most of their advantage in this area by telling organisations and showing them how great the integration can be. It's wrong that most companies find that Blackberry and iPhones integrates better with Exchange than Microsoft's own phones...at my old place of work (in the UK), they were rolling out iPads and most employees has iPhones, so it was a natural leap.